The only commandment that asks us to REMEMBER is the very one we have chosen to forget. I am not clear exactly why that is the case. But it seems to be universally true especially in our culture today. Perhaps we choose to forget it because we really don’t know what it means, or we know exactly what it means and are afraid to remember it.

Remember the Sabbath Day and Keep It Holy!

There have been many books written on the Sabbath. One of our adult classes looked at such a book this past spring. Various scholars have different and similar takes on the meaning of this commandment.

Walter Bruggemann, for example, would want us to believe that Sabbath is the most radical social action the church can take. No mealy mouth definition here. He sees it as much more than taking time to take a walk or the productive use of our time while driving in traffic. For Dr. Brueggemann Sabbath is the center of the first five books of the Torah. In the first instance it is not about attending worship on Sunday. For him it is about WORK STOPPAGE.

It was given to us from God as a day to stop our usual routine of work and consumption. It was to be a day unlike any other day. Persistent production and consumption is not God’s plan. And yet if we are following the worldly narrative of today our value and worth is insidiously connected to constant production and unending consumption.

But the God we worship is outside the rules of any Pharaoh. See, if we don’t keep the Sabbath we will once again find ourselves in Pharaoh’s brickyard. The Sabbath was a substitute offer to the National Quota System. OUR GOD IS A GOD of REST!

You see one of the important Sabbath questions we should be asking ourselves is this: Who are the Pharaoh’s in our lives? Who or what is it that keeps us from focusing on our relationship with God. Sabbath is an anti-chaos gift from the Creator. One the seventh day GOD RESTED. You see, God says on the seventh day to all the sea monsters of our lives……Take two aspirins and call me in the morning. I know you want a 24-7 God!

Sabbath is a time for “NEFESH” – a renewal of the self, the soul, the whole being. Three times the Hebrew word nefesh is used as a verb……We are told that GOD was nefeshed – refreshed. If God needed refreshing who are we to deny it for ourselves? In God’s wisdom and experience God knew that if we were to fall into endless production and consumption we would become hopelessly anxious and depressed. Could our forgetting of the Sabbath be the reason, as a recent report tells us, that over 50% of US citizens suffer from some mental illness? I wonder if we are not paying a great price for our forgetfulness. Remember the Sabbath we are commanded!

Sabbath Keeping allows us to live out of a sense of abundance rather than a narrative of scarcity that says…there is not enough money, not enough time, not enough imagination, not enough resources , not enough anything. Such wrongheaded thinking leads to anxiety and anxiety is an elemental distrust in the God of abundance promised to us in scripture.

Sabbath ought to be a time of idleness. Can one dare say that in this society? Sabbath is a time to reflect, ponder, and develop an ever deeper relationship with the source of all life. When we as individual or as a society do not take this time for reflection, meditation, contemplation, we run the risk of becoming some kind of fascist locked-stepped people not knowing where we are going…..following others in some mindless pattern of life.

The Chinese have a symbol for busyness. As you know Chinese symbols are often more than one character linked together to say what it means. The symbol in Chinese for busyness is the joining of the character for heart with that of the character for killing. Busyness = a killing of the heart.

The invitation we find in the Gospel of Matthew today is not one offered to everyone. The invitation is to those who are weary. I have come to believe that we grow weary not because we work too hard but because we are working against the grain of whom we are created to be. We seem to live with a self-defeating motto: one more, one more, one more, one more anything will make this a better place, a better life, and then we will be loved and appreciated. The problem with this way of living is that one more is never really enough. Our exhaustion is rooted in anxiety and we are too anxious to rest. You see, we try to take the place of the life guaranteed by God!

We are afraid to share our pain or passion. We become Zombies of denial. We are invited away from our contradictions by way of the Sabbath. Sabbath is a way to come away from our contradicted lives of denial. Sabbath is the time to turn to the truth and to the true self.

I wonder what would happen if the church were to become a place of TRUTH TELLERS. You see if you tell the truth you will utter the pain the world wishes to deny. But the truth is this: Pain is the MATRIX for newness. Speak the truth to your heart and you will find your weariness diminished. Tell the truth: not the RED truth or the BLUE truth. The truth is that remembering is so easy to forget. The truth is that REMEMBERING the Sabbath will radically change your life and the life of the world we live in. We forget it at our peril.

But we as Christians must move from TRUTH TELLING to HOPE TELLING. Hope-tellers are poets. Let us speak of hope not with conservative certitude or liberal self-confidence. Both offer their own false images. No, we need to tell the hope of a new heaven and a new earth….a new Baghdad, a new Austin!

The Good Friday People of Pain have never given in to their despair. Anxiety fed by denial has no power on truth telling. Despair fed by coercion has no power in hope telling. HEAR THIS: The more we trust in God the easier our lives become. Sabbath Keeping gives us a chance to bring together in some semblance of unity our
Public/private selves into our true Baptized selves.

Sabbath keeping subverts the world’s self-destructive notion of production and consumption. Do any of you remember that once long running Lipton Tea Ad? You know the one where the actor falls into a cool swimming pool meant to be falling into Lipton Ice Tea? We should become people who are falling back into SABBATH. For when we do we will be held, emancipated and made hopeful…we will sing and dance once again….dancing away from denial….singing away from despair.

But let me say a bit more about Sabbath Keeping. Sabbath is a time to reflect, to be quite, and to be still. Pascal says, “that we don’t want to be still and quite because then we can hear the grass growing on our graves.” Staying busy, continuing life as usual keeps us from becoming fully the person God created us to be.

I have heard myself say it and I have heard you proclaim it…….I’ll develop a discipline of quite prayer when I have the time. With Jesus as our model we must know that he did not wait until all his work was done before he turned to Sabbath prayer. We must take time, sacred, holy time to be still so we can hear that still small voice. There is something about the way we pray that seems at some level a bit goofy. For instance we go to God with information about someone we love who is sick as if Jesus didn’t know. “Oh,” I can hear God say, “I didn’t know that. Which hospital is she in?”

Sabbath is making room for God. Mystical prayer…praying without words is making room for God – pushing out all that gets in the way of an intimate relationship with our Lord. To me, that is true Sabbath. If you don’t know how to do that you only have to ask me.

The times I have asked you to describe Central I have heard the following:
• Central is a church with a longstanding commitment to the poor
• Central is known for its outstanding music program
• My church is a friendly, welcoming, and inclusive family of faith

But I have never heard anyone describe Central as a Church of Prayer.. a church committed to a deeper relationship with God…individually and corporately. Maybe it’s because remembering is so easy to forget and we speed up so we don’t have to slow down. (Pause)

But that is no note on which to end this sermon so allow me to close with some GOOD NEWS.

Back in the sixties there was a movie. The name of it escapes me. But the movie was built around the concept of a chess game. The two players were the devil and this individual. The movie comes to an end as the devil moves his queen into a position and declares CHECKMATE! Game over! Movie over! The theme, of course….when you play with the devil you lose. Young Bobby Fisher was watching the movie and declared: Why did he give up….The King had one more move!!!!

That’s the story of hope we have to tell...The KING has one more move! That’s the story of hope…OUR GOD always has one more move.

When they say that we cannot end poverty…we say…The King has one more move! When they say that the pain is unbearable…we say…the King has one more move! When they say that the fight is lost to save the environment…we say…The King has one more move! When they say that world peace will never happen…we say…The King has one more move! When they say that Central has little chance of ever growing to capacity…we say…The King has one more move!

When we remember…when we remember the One who calls us into the Kingdom….when we remember to remember the source of all that is good and live out of that relationship, then we have Remembered the Sabbath and have Kept it Holy!


Let us pray: total silence